All Articles by Mary Craig

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On Saturday, the Mariners won 13-0 against the Texas Rangers for their 85th win of the season, and were officially eliminated from postseason contention. On Sunday I woke up very early (for me, a child-free person who works late at night) and drove to Kent, about half an hour outside Seattle, to watch my friend…

It was a letdown, when this year’s Women’s Baseball World Cup ended, to go back to watching men’s. Much has been written about the hard baseball details of the women’s tournament: the match-ups, the spin rates, the turf, the rain, the sharpness of the double plays and the joy of the home runs. The athletes…

It’s been raining in D.C. for either 72 hours, or possibly 40 days and 40 nights. We haven’t rounded up two of every relief pitcher for the ark quite yet, but it’s been a wet couple of days. There’s something biblical about this kind of constant, soaking rain, particularly in a city with poor drainage,…

It’s a common thing for those of us who follow the minor leagues or college baseball to sigh over particularly deliciously named players; I myself have written a “D-II baseball player or YA hero?” quiz for these very electronic pages. It’s all in good fun, but it’s also a reminder that the landscape of names…

In my room at my parents’ house, there’s a bookcase devoted less to books than various autographed baseball memorabilia, from balls to bats to… a few books. I’ve received few by my own hand; most arrived as gifts. If not for the authentication cards accompanying them, I wouldn’t be able to discern the names scribbled…

Go to a game, and it’s not uncommon to see an MLB player having a catch with some lucky young fan in the stands: Aaron Judge and Mike Trout have both been photographed doing it, in the tradition of Nick Swisher and David Wright before them. It’s a charming piece of baseball arcana, another reminder…

In 1794, the newly formed Commonwealth of Pennsylvania codified a law that had existed in spirit since 1682. As part of a series of similar laws collectively known as the “Blue Laws,” this particular one made illegal the performance of “any worldly employment or business whatsoever on the Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday … or…

The old hiker’s adage “take only memories, leave only footprints” is a nice idea in principle, albeit impossible in practice. We are constantly leaving pieces of us behind: flakes of skin, errant hairs, clothing fibers, all things ready to leap overboard at the slightest bit of contact. “Every contact leaves a trace,” states Locard’s Exchange…

Reading through the number of apologies issued by players and organizations these past few weeks has reminded me of sitting down with a stack of students’ papers to grade. They’re filled with errors, products of players who have never had to apologize for anything, just as students litter papers with common errors, each the mark…

For many fans, to love baseball is to love it unconditionally. It doesn’t matter how bad one’s team is or how many disagreements one has with the minutiae of the game. There will always be the next game, the next season, the next great draft pick to root for. But loving baseball is not an…

My grandfather passed away a while back, leading to the sad but necessary chore of cleaning out his apartment. Beyond the willed items, this was mostly wrapping up the odds and ends of everyday life: reuniting an odd silver spoon with the family set, deciding whether or not the yarmulke he wore at a relation’s…

On Monday night, the Lake Elsinore Storm, the High-A team of the Padres, did their annual “Nothing Night.” On the junior-junior-junior-junior circuit of the low minors, teams try to draw interest with a series of increasingly outlandish promotions, name changes, wild food items, and one-off jerseys that riff on seemingly every pop-culture phenomenon and ’90s…

All right, gang. It’s officially summer. And what is it that kids love most about baseball? “Chris Russo shrieking into a camera–” That’s right: America. So this Independence Day, we’re pulling out all the stops. Stars and stripes on the hats. Stars and stripes on the arm sleeves. Stars and stripes on the catching gear….

In case you haven’t heard, Ichiro Suzuki snuck into the Mariners’ dugout last Thursday via a fake mustache. Like Bobby Valentine before him, he was easily discovered, and whether under his own volition or that of Major League Baseball, he was gone from the dugout by the start of the second inning. While he gave…

My father is fond of the phrase “threw up on his shoes” to indicate a person spectacularly failing at a clutch moment, usually used in conjunction with the phrase “not exactly covering himself in glory, eh?” It’s a phrase pairing that gets used a lot, because he’s a lifelong Mariners fan. Yet on Sunday, the…

The length of its existence and sheer volume of games make it essentially impossible for one to know everything about the game. Even the things we think we know can be thrown into doubt, leaving a gaping hole where once there was certainty, creating ample opportunity for speculation among the hazy visage of fact. For…